09 March 2013 4:50 PM

'The Methods of Stalin - The Presentational Skills of Richard and Judy', my report on Hugo Chavez's Venezuela from 2008.

The death of Hugo Chavez prompts me to reproduce this article, my report from Caracas , which was first published in the Mail on Sunday in April 2008.

OUT OF the grave we thought we’d shovelled it into all those years ago, revolutionary Marxism comes climbing once again. Most of us were pleased to see it go, but not all of us.

No wonder the world’s incurably fashionable Leftists, who hate their own countries, love Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. They have been homeless since the USSR fizzled away in a cloud of rust, and even more bereft since a trembling Fidel Castro laid down his combat fatigues and went off into the twilight in his pyjamas.

Comrade Chavez has given them back a fatherland, and provided them with a hero – a strangely lovable, smiling one, with a sense of humour and a good line in teasing mockery of the United States. He also has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world.

Castro, of course, never had any oil. But Venezuela is overflowing with it, which changes everything. In this increasingly sinister country, oil money sustains a more or less unhinged regime that mixes the methods of Stalin and the presentational skills of Richard and Judy to impose socialism on the Caribbean’s southern shores.

It also makes global mischief, flirting with Iran and the rest of the outcast and stroppy nations of the world. Does it matter? Yes. Venezuela is now an important global focus for trouble; a rallying point for the enemies of Western society and lawful democracy, a new source of hope for every silly idealist, from London’s Ken Livingstone upwards.

And it is a menace to the wobbling economies of the world. Chavez has been busily nagging Opec to keep up the world price of oil, while cunningly keeping down the cost at home to buy votes. Oil may fetch more than $100 a barrel on the world markets, but Venezuelans can fill their cars for just 75 pence .

Still, economic bungling of the standard Marxist kind can create bankruptcy and rationing out of the greatest abundance. What ought to be one of the most prosperous societies on earth is suffering grave shortages of the most basic things. This week in Caracas I have seen many queues for milk, which even the rich cannot get. If a delivery arrives at a supermarket it is gone in half an hour. Last week there was no lavatory paper. Before that, it was rice and meat you couldn’t get.

Inflation is terrible, and power cuts are increasingly common.

Amid this mess, the nation’s would-be despot rules largely through a curious weekly TV talk show – Hallo, President! – in which he harangues his people, argues with his audience, publicly humiliates and lectures his terrified ministers, invents policies, prophesies grandiose schemes which will never happen and occasionally breaks into song. Comrade Chavez fancies himself as a singer, a baseball player and a comedian.

As he himself says: ‘It’s a religious programme – because God only knows when it will end.’ Which is true enough. Dignitaries invited to join the studio audience take cushions, sandwiches and bottles of water to help them endure the hours of raging, reminiscence and chatter.

El Presidente’s unending rants have become a national joke. At a recent summit in Chile, King Juan Carlos of Spain snapped at Chavez: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Millions of Venezuelans downloaded the rebuke and use it as the ring-tone on their mobiles.

Sleepless and obsessive, Chavez pursues his revolutionary ends into the small hours, ringing his cabinet with his latest ideas, commandeering TV stations, descending on remote townships and ordering local officials to complete 17 impossible targets before breakfast.

They just hope he won’t come back and check, for his wrath can be terrible.

This might appear to be a fun revolution: student politics on a big budget. It must be the only country where the graffiti is done by the government, with the police standing guard over artists as they spray pro-Chavez murals. Activists are everywhere in their scarlet, slogan-covered T-shirts. In the squares of Caracas, little stalls called ‘Hot Corners’ blare out revolutionary speeches and hand out propaganda – which probably helps make up for the lavatory-paper shortage.

But it is not half so funny if you look closely. And it is not funny at all if you dare to stand up to Chavez. For this brilliant, impulsive and charming former parachute officer is also a ruthless seeker of power and true believer in revolution. And he does not really care how he gets control, or how he holds on to it.

He may go on about democracy, but he would have been perfectly happy to attain office with gunfire and tanks. His first attempt at the presidency was in 1992, when he tried a military coup. It was a clownish failure; the sort of putsch where people fail to turn up on time, get lost and cannot find the keys to vital buildings.

So much for Lieutenant Colonel Chavez’s military skills. But amazingly, before they took him away to prison, the authorities put him on TV so he could order his followers to lay down their arms. He did so, but added two crucial words: ‘Por ahora’ (For now).

Like Schwarzenegger’s ‘I’ll be back’ in The Terminator, this has become his catchphrase – it thrills supporters and frightens opponents.

From that day, his popularity grew. And it is easy to see why. Like almost every oil state, Venezuela has fouled up its inheritance. Needless poverty besieges Caracas in the form of squalid, chaotic, violent shanty towns that are so dangerous the police won’t go there at weekends. In this country of 28million people, there are 1,000 murders a month and guns are everywhere.

Yet these shameful slums lie within sight of the modern towers of the city. Chavez realised there were millions of votes in these suppurating places, so he scattered his oil bounty among them. Cuban medical workers have set up clinics in the slums. Smart new schools are being built there. Hundreds of thousands receive state handouts direct from Chavez, who has seized the state oil company and uses it as a private bank to reward supporters.

These supporters know which side their votes are buttered: pro-Chavez posters decorate their wretched homes. Standing outside his sister’s tiny three-room house – or shed – in the San Agustin shanty district, Juan, a security guard working for a state project, told me: ‘In all my 53 years Hugo Chavez is the best leader this country has ever had. Before him, this neighbourhood was abandoned. Now we have such good health care that doctors come to our homes on house calls.’ He adds quickly: ‘This is thanks to our Cuban brothers.’

Now I am sure some of what Juan said was intended for the suspicious-looking character who hung around nearby as we talked, ears flapping, plainly spying for the state.

But some of it was true. The San Agustin slum has been festering on its humid hillside for 70 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything about it. That is why Venezuela’s ‘democratic’ non-socialist political parties are discredited and widely hated.

Chavez has proved that neglect of the poor is not inevitable, he speaks and thinks like them and has used the oil billions to build up an army of followers who will vote for him.

Nobody can claim Venezuela was ever a well-run, fair country. But it does have quite a strong civil society, independent of the state in a way Marxists cannot stand. Press and TV are free. The universities teach without state interference. The government more or less abides by the constitution. Private property is as safe as steel bars, guards and barricades at the ends of wealthy streets can make it.

Yet there is now a dark threat: last year Chavez moved beyond social reform and began to show his very sharp teeth. He began by shutting down the country’s oldest TV station, RCTV, because its criticisms had annoyed him. That’s when he encountered dangerous resistance for the first time.

It came from people he could not dismiss as plutocrats or supporters of the old regime. His opponents were middle-class students. One of their leaders was Geraldine Alvarez, a 22-year-old who does not look or sound like a would-be politician, but as if she would rather be out at a party. And that is what makes her so dangerous to Chavez. She is not a professional politician, she serves no vested interest and she is immune to all his nasty Bolshevik tactics.

When Chavez said he would close RCTV, she and some friends began a protest. The official TV station censored them. The police attacked their peaceful protests with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

Geraldine said: ‘When we went to the National Assembly and asked for the right of reply, they said we were terrorists and trained by the CIA. They said on state TV that I was mentally ill. But most people did not buy these lies. Poor people in this country view students with sympathy. They could see the placards we carried were home-made, not mass-produced like those of the government.’

Nor did people believe it when Chavez sneered that the students were ‘spoiled rich brats’, since most came from modest middle-class or working-class homes.

WHEN censorship and smears failed, the regime re-sorted to the bully tactics familiar in Eastern European countries as they were dragged into communism in the Forties. Supposedly spontaneous ‘counter-demonstrators’ appeared, hurling stones and bottles at the students – from behind police lines.

Chavez supporters, firing guns, raged through the campus of the main Caracas university. The bullet holes can still be seen in buildings.

‘It was so dangerous at one time that we had to wear bulletproof vests,’ Geraldine recalls. But they never fell into Chavez’s trap, refusing to attack the President personally and ignoring calls from the opposition leaders: ‘We said, “We are students, not politicians.”’

By this time, Chavez had taken his next step: a planned new constitution that would have abolished the 12-year limit on his term of office, and which many believed would threaten private property.

Geraldine said: ‘We stopped people in the streets and on the buses and urged them to read these proposals. We wanted to wake the people up.’

Their courage and determination paid off. Chavez began to lose powerful support among his own oldest friends. General Raul Isaias Baduel, 52, had been a comrade from their early days in the army together, but he resigned as defence minister in protest at the planned constitutional changes. He is now trying to build a new opposition.

The desk in Baduel’s office – untypically for a paratroop commander – is covered in books on politics and philosophy.

The table behind it is crowded with Roman Catholic religious images curiously mingled with a Koran and an Israeli army camouflage skullcap. He and Chavez are no longer friends. ‘I feel he has cancelled our friendship,’ he says. Typically, Chavez was charming at first but later Baduel’s bodyguards were abruptly withdrawn and Chavez supporters began to smear him. Baduel’s actions, while commanding a paratroop unit based near the capital, saved Chavez from a Right-wing coup attempt in 2002. Yet, in 2007, Baduel accused his old friend of planning what was in effect a coup against the constitution. He says on both occasions he was acting according to the same principle.

Chavez’s admirers would also find it hard to dismiss Ismael Garcia, leader of the socialist Podemos party (the name means ‘we can’). Garcia shows me a picture of himself at a rally a few years ago, sitting smiling two seats away from his one-time comrade, Chavez. But he, too, has now split with him, refusing to merge his group into the single party Chavez wants, once again using Stalinist tactics from 60 years and 4,000 miles away.

Garcia says Chavez’s constitutional reforms would have threatened private property had they gone ahead: ‘He proposed the state model that failed in the Soviet Union, in which the state controls everything.’

Together, the student movement, the shortages and the defections of his old allies led to Chavez being narrowly beaten in a referendum on his constitutional changes. Many feared he would ignore the result and go ahead anyway, others suspected he would rig the vote, but with surprising wisdom and patience, he did neither. It is rumoured his old friend Castro called him from his sick-bed to tell him to bow to the verdict and play a long game. So he waits.

He continues to use oil money to buy the backing of the poor and – it is widely believed – arm them against the remote danger of another army coup.

He plans a slow revenge on the students: he is demanding that universities drop their entrance exams so he can pack them with his young, half-educated supporters.

Oil prices continue to climb, so Chavez will be able to buy off most trouble for the foreseeable future. And then?

To reassure supporters and intimidate critics, huge red placards have been placed on high points in the city, bearing those two words ‘Por ahora’ with which he once before promised to be back.

As the United States weakens and China grows in power, as the victories of the Cold War are frittered away and Russia slides back towards its ancient autocracy, what happened to all those brave hopes that free societies were here to stay and the mad experiments of the 20th Century would never be repeated?

Here we go again, red flags flapping, off to the same old disaster – and fashionable Leftists in the West are applauding, as usual.

Charles Stephenson – A reasonable person can observe major and significant differences in behaviour between men and women due to nature, without having to provide exact percentages from research, especially as research grants are controlled by a Left wing academic elite who only dish out grants to those who are on-message – the same applies in grant allocation re AGW and drug legalisation studies – one side only tends to get the grants, and in all these examples we know which side it is.

I suggest that many a Leftie sociology lecturer does not believe the anti-science PC doctrines that he delivers in lectures, about men and women being fundamentally the same, although saying these falsehoods does not trouble him as those who think as the Left do not think the way the rest do. Most persons assign value to the scientific truth and would feel some inner unease about using bad science to invert the truth. But the Left think in a different way, and they see the message to be delivered as their set of morals, and pursuit of truth has no value to them.

On Radio 4 ‘More or Less’ about getting to the bottom of statistics in one edition they examined the phenomenon that 99% of top chess players are male. Guess what – they found that there was no evidence that this was due to innate sex differences. In other words, they twisted the data so that sexism in nature can be explained away. Just like the AGW crowd explaining away ANY temperature data as compatible with global warming. Re chess, they did it by identifying inputs from nurture which cannot be quantified, and then exaggerating their significance to get the result they wanted.

It is these types who get grants in academia, not those who say men and women have innate differences. That is one reason I cannot point you to a research paper about why men are skip lorry drivers. Another reason is that exact figures such as you demand are not possible to acquire, as the input from society’s prejudices is difficult to quantify. But all this is beside the point. Your demand for exact figures from some PC sociology lecturer on grants following a PC agenda is irrelevant, as I appeal not to this non-existent research to back my views, I appeal to logic and reason and common sense – men are, by nature, by their genes, more inclined to drive big lorries than women are.

And many will have less respect for our scientists in academia who persuaded the government to sign the Climate Change Act when the power blackouts start. See today’s DM headline about gas rationing. We have only 36 hours of gas left. We have 100s of years of coal and shale gas left, but the academics on the Left who control the grants and whom you seem to admire have persuaded our government we cannot use coal and shale gas (or hinder its use) due to AGW.

You say: ‘genes control behaviour in humans - this is proved by the obvious differences in behaviour between men and women that can only be due to the genes.’

Firstly, it is most definitely not proved by the example you give, and you must know it.

However, leaving that aside for just one moment let me ask you this: are you arguing that the controlling influence of genes is total? Or is it ten per cent, or fifty per cent, or what?

You also say that those who disagree with you are anti-science fools.

Be careful. It will be you that looks very foolish if you cannot provide any evidence to back up your case.

I didn’t think I’d need to point it out before, but it is now obvious that you don’t know about the requirements of evidence to back up a biological or scientific argument.

It has nothing to do with whether I might ‘admire’ such evidence; it is whether anyone has carried out any studies that might support your point.

If they have then direct me to them.

If they haven’t then you are making it up; your wishes are being father to your thoughts in other words.

Finally, you seem to think that your point about skip lorries (why skip lorries in particular?) is some kind of litmus test.

It isn’t, particularly the way you have phrased it because you have pre-judged the answer. I quote:

‘If you say nature, you agree with me’

‘if you say nurture then any reasonable person reading this will see that your politics has made you unable (or unwilling) to see obvious differences between men and women that everyone else can see clearly.’

What if I say ‘a bit of both?’ Which of course takes us right back up to my question to you above concerning proportions.

Charles Stephenson - (a) genes control behaviour in dogs - as I gave evidence to prove. (b) genes control behaviour in humans - this is proved by the obvious differences in behaviour between men and women that can only be due to the genes.

Both these statements are true no matter how many 'reputable sources' such as you might admire - BBC producers, sociology lecturers etc, deny (b), and in so doing make themselves look like anti-science fools by declaring that the reason more men are skip lorry drivers than women is due to nurture not nature.

Your request for specific references is irrelevant to (a) and (b) above, which stand on their own merit. You are unable to respond to the points I make, so instead you demanding authors who agree me - this is a diversion because to cannot reply to my points. Eg see how you could not answer my hard question.

Charles Stephenson – You say I go too far towards nature, but the establishment makes themselves look like anti-science fools by going too far the other way – to be specific, they stand up and declare with a straight face that the reason more men are skip lorry drivers than women is not due to differences in wiring between men and women which arise from the genes, rather it is due to society’s prejudices and lack of opportunity for women. I wonder how many sociology lecturers are embarrassed and feel like fools when they stand in front of their students and say such obvious falsehoods, as if even nature has to conform to their equality legislation.

What do you think? Do you think men driving skips more than women (an example of innate differences pointed out by Peter Hitchens a while ago) – do you think this phenomenon is due to nature or nurture? If you say nature, you agree with me that the genes determine human behaviour to a considerable extent. And if you say nurture then any reasonable person reading this will see that your politics has made you unable (or unwilling) to see obvious differences between men and women that everyone else can see clearly. A hard question for you to answer.

And you want research to underpin my conclusion that genes make the wiring that controls the behaviour. The evidence is that if you bring up labrador pups and pitbull pups together in the same stable loving environment, then one breed will be, on the whole, vicious in behaviour, and the other will be, one the whole, gentle. The difference in behaviour in this scenario can only be due to the genes, if the pups are brought up the same way. Proof that this is correct that pitbulls are never used as dogs for the blind.

Humans are, like dogs, social pack animals, so why should the same not apply to humans, only more so, as our behaviour is more sophisticated? Or do you suggest that behaviour is from the genes in dogs but not in humans? If this does not apply in humans, why not? We are just social pack animals like dogs are.

Would you say that (a) obvious differences in behaviour between the human male and female stem from the genes, but (b) obvious differences in behaviour between criminals and non-criminals does not stem from the genes, although (c) clear differences in behaviour between dogs does?

I am aware, though I don’t keep up with the latest research, of the ‘nature versus nurture,’ relationship of genotype to phenotype, genetic determinism, or call-it-what-you-will, debate in respect of homo sapiens.

I am also aware that those scholars and scientists who have studied the matter form a spectrum of opinion in regard to it.

It is clear and indisputable that there is some balance, some interaction or influence, between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in making all of us who and what we are; that the genotype influences to some degree the phenotype.

Your analysis though comes down firmly at one end of that spectrum, attributing human behaviours exclusively to inherent biological or genetic factors.

To you, nature definitely trumps nurture and the genotype unequivocally determines the phenotype.

This is, I would submit, unusual.

That was the reason why I asked if you could point me towards any research that might underpin your conclusions.

You’ve obviously read widely on the topic, and I’m genuinely curious to know.

Charles Stephenson - I do not think that saying the brain presents alternative scenarios to the consciousness complete with predictions of likely outcomes and associated risks that result from following different courses of action, and assigns these predictions of outcome value that is represented in the brain by neuron activity in specialised areas of the brain devoted to this specific task, - I do not think this is original in any way whatsoever, but perhaps simplifying it to the level of a few simple numbers is not how the process is usually described, but I only did that to put it in simple terms.

We are controlled more by our animal side than perhaps most persons think. For example, sometimes the animal side takes over completely and does not even allow your thinking side to control you own body. This is experienced by many persons whose thinking side tells them to intervene when someone is attacked, but are physically unable to do so as their bodies will not allow it. These persons call themselves cowards afterwards, but are not as they had no choice. Also, the inhibition to hit a stranger is incredibly strong in most humans, and sometimes cannot be overcome even if the thinking side wills it, although not so for many of the inhabitants of our prisons.

An antelope will attack a lion when defending its young. This is not courage, it is the instincts of the antelope taking over. Similarly, a young human mother of gentle disposition can turn into a raging bull when protecting her infant. Afterwards everyone says she was so brave, when in fact she was not - her animal side ordered her to attack. In fact she had no choice at the moment the animal side took over.

Nothing I have said in this post is new or original. But you will find conventional thinking sometimes unwilling to go a bit further and suggest that some person have faulty wiring that makes them inclined to be criminals (but this notion is discussed, I just mean they have to tread carefully). Whatever the reason for this is, it also leads to inhibition and careful treading when differences in wiring between men and women is discussed. If they deny the obvious difference in brain wiring between men and women, thus making themselves look like fools when they explain lack of women skip drivers as being due to lack of opportunities for women, they are naturally going to experience similar inhibition when it comes to discussing differences in wiring between some criminals and the rest of the population.

The reason a pitbull is more likely to attack another dog than a labrador, the reason is its neuron connections – its wiring – advise the dog that this is a good idea. If the pitbull knew that its owner did not want it to, that is another input for the dog’s consciousness to consider before attacking. The attractiveness of the notion of attacking is represented by actual electrical currents in actual physical neurons. This does not have an actual readable numeric value, but purely for the purpose of illustrating the processes by the use of a model, let us assign this urge a value of +8, (with a maximum level being 10). This dog really wants to attack. Without any other inputs, the dog would certainly now attack. But suppose the owner is with the dog and he orders the dog not to attack. In a dog of the type the owner would like to own (an obedient one), this instruction from the owner would be presented to the dog’s consciousness with a high value – say +9. The dog would yelp and experience inner turmoil from the strong urges to attack (which can be observe this yourself in a dog when it is ordered not to do something it keenly wants to do), but in the end 9-8=1 so the notion of not attacking wins. That is how it works in terms of ‘wiring’.

It is the same with humans. The lower type human sees another person with a valuable phone that he could grab. Grabbing the phone is assigned merit of +8 by his wiring – a very favourable notion indeed. Empathy for the victim=0, fear of prison= 0, fear of the other person… let’s get a closer look, oh, he’s quite hard looking, resulting in fear of being beaten up oneself is +8, so this high value cancels out the opposite urge (also 8 but pulling in the opposite direction), and so no mugging takes place. Suppose another person comes along. They look quite weak, so the same values apply as before except for the fear of the other person now a low value, only 2. So, 8 in favour of mugging versus 2 against, therefore it is no contest – 8-2 = 6 a strong result in favour of mugging - mug him now!

Thus the lower type human such as the above is indeed merely like a machine controlled by wiring just as the pitbull is. But now let us put another factor into the equation – if prison had not deliberately been made like a comfortable holiday by the Left, and was instead a place to be avoided, the deterrent value above changes from 0 to 7. Now the revised values are 8 in favour of mugging and (2+7) against = 9 against, so the lower type human animal does not attack.

Once we realise that such humans are no more wired for morals than a pitbull that mauls a child is, we can treat them accordingly.

Ahh, at last, someone arrives who can write posts with proper argument and not just ad hominems like the other pair.

D Bunker – those with lower type wiring, the human equivalent of the pitbull if you like, identify themselves for us by murdering children for fun, by being violent muggers, rapists of strangers, and wanting to fight to the death if someone ‘disses’ them. So, to answer your question, they are self identifying by following the criminal urges that they are wired to follow. Unfortunately, someone has to be their victim before we can pick them out.

D Bunker asks: “And if they behave badly then that is proof that their genes and their wiring are bad?”

Yes, if they do certain things, such as murdering children for fun. Those who do lesser bad things and then are tormented by regret and remorse later are possibly wired normally, it is not for me to say, but I certainly can say with confidence that those who kill children for fun and then are at ease with themselves afterwards, and who want to do it again, they are certainly like that because of bad wiring (or gaps in the wiring – missing parts)..

I do not describe them as evil, any more than the pitbull that kills its master’s two year old child is ‘evil’. I suggest that if we could analyse the ‘program’ that controls such human animals, ie their brain neurons, or their ‘wiring’ for want of a better term, we would find that in the areas of the brain for empathy, morals etc, these types of human have wiring that is missing or different from the rest of the population. Although I would say they are wired to be ‘bad’, I think it is more accurate to describe them as exhibiting extremes of behaviour from the gene pool, from which the rest of the population has every right to protect itself – by separating them out and preventing their breeding for the rest of their lives at the very least, (and with retribution also in many cases to give closure to victims).

I would not advocate such a policy whilst the legal system is run by the criminal lovers, however, as ours is, as they will seek to send the wrong types to the island, as we now follow inverted justice in this country. The island would be full of OAPs who cannot afford the BBC tax, those who commit Thought Crimes, and police officers who make phone calls to certain newspapers. I would only support the policy of separating off the criminals for life when the better persons amongst the population have the upper hand, not when the lower types and criminal lovers have the upper hand, as is the case now, perhaps due to the vast wealth of state spending and democracy favouring them.

Charles Stephenson – it’s not that I cannot stand the ‘heat’ as you describe your approach of calling me insane in every post - after all, I am still here, in the playground. I merely point out your inappropriate behaviour to others. Obviously if any normal persons would like to continue the discussion about the extent to which we are animals programmed to behave in certain ways in the same way that dogs are, and the extent to which this explains the behaviour of the Left in hating certain groups and being pro-criminal, then I would be happy to continue the discussion.

Bob intrigues me. I hope he'll correct me if I've got this wrong, but his point seems to be this:

There are good people with good genes and good wiring.
And there are bad people with bad genes and bad wiring.

Now the interesting question is whether Bob can tell which people have the goodies and which people have the baddies. The problem with this sort of thinking is, of course, that once a person is assigned bad genes and bad wiring (by Bob), then there's no changing it. That person is condemned to being evil. No chance of repentence. No Saul can change to Paul.

Even more interesting is whether Bob can tell which is which - who has good or bad wiring and good or bad genes - BEFORE they do anything. Or does he have to wait and see how they act? And if they behave badly then that is proof that their genes and their wiring are bad?

This reminds me of Calvin. He too (if I remember rightly) claimed he could tell who had the Grace of God and who didn't - by their actions. Which sounds very much like Bob's reasoning. I wonder if Bob is a latent Calvinist.

Wesley Crosland - 'The Spirit Level' is a rather flawed piece of social science, and shouldn't, I think, be taken as authoritative on anything. I don't necessarily disagree with that particular view of China - I'm all for liberal democracy - but there can be no denying that economic policies have a large part to play.

In terms of leaving others to make up their minds about the regular BNP supporters who post here, this is one of out most enjoyable bouts to date.
I mean, if you can't cope with my modest efforts at mocking the afflicted, perhaps you should refrain accordingly. It's not me who chooses to waffle on about brain wiring and cross-breeding, is it?
Still, there's always the chance that William, who now appears to have defected to UKIP, might change his mind and come to your aid...

To Charles Stephenson – You are once again calling me unbalanced and a conspiracy theorist in your post below. I think other readers of this blog can see this clearly. Ad hominems are not encouraged in blogs such as this one, as it just distracts from the debate. I could spend time rubbishing you back as I sometimes do the other regular poster who likes to use indirect ad hominems, as in his case returning ad hominens to him makes him polite for a few days afterwards, but in your case somehow I don’t think it will make any difference, so I just write this post so others can make their own minds up about you.

Alan Thomas – You say you are enjoying this debate.

Are you enjoying the debate because you like making indirect ad hominems to me and then getting indirect ad hominems back? Is that fun for you? It does not seem to be, as your defensive post about the office on the motorway shows you are hurt by what I said about you personally. Well, you could always desist in your personal abuse, with which you have continuously polluted this blog over several years both to myself and others. Perhaps you observed Peter Hitchens’ indirect personal abuse to Nick Griffin when PH said there was a bad smell when Nick Griffin left the QT studio, and perhaps you thought this gave you the green light to post dozens, if not hundreds, of personally abusive and gossipy posts in this blog over the years – always whispering about who would get on with whom, and who reminds you of who, rather than debating the current topic. Always indirectly, though, to get around the rules. Like me introducing words like ‘slithering’ and ‘hissing’ at the end of my posts about you. Not clever. Not hard to do. Who knows why you behave as you do? I come to this blog to debate why the country is committing suicide and where the hate of the left comes from, the latter being the topic of this particular blog. You, on the other hand, come here to make personal ad hominems at other posters, then get upset and defensive when you get some back.

Or, are you enjoying the debate because you think I cannot provide an example where the elimination of better persons from a publicly-funded sector is at the 100% level, such that no persons of morals and virtue in this particular sector have managed to get through the selection process that is designed to keep persons of virtue and morals out? ( - I think I can actually name such a sector and prove that there are no persons of morals and true virtue in it)

Is this another of your studies; should one really expect 'proper' debating in the office, have you experienced (suffered from?) improper debating in the office, is debating in other workplaces more 'proper' - if so, how do you reach that conclusion and who sets the rules for workplace debate?
Incidentally, for most of working life - particularly in later years - I was 'on the road', in my office on the motorway, as the say. But whatever being in the office has to do with our political differences, I have no idea. Perhaps your life is spent on in a library, studying brain-wiring or dog-breeding. One can only guess...

It's not a difficult question, Bob, particularly for one who appears of a 'scientific' discipline. So, for the 3rd, or possibly 4th time, how do you know that those who decide promotions 'never' take into account personal character or virtue in the sectors you selected?

Blimey, Bob, is it that tricky? You can either say 'I don't', amend the passage in question by changing 'never' to 'seldom', add 'in my opinion', or give up!
I'm not really fussed which, really... although I must say I'm probably enjoying this exchange more than you. Indeed, almost as much as I enjoy our bouts concerning your selection of Nick Griffin as 'one of the better people'...

You still fail to address the central point at issue in the whole Planet BSoB scenario; that of genetic (or biological) determinism as it applies to humans.

The question then remains: Are those, whom I characterised as goats and you refer to as lower types, so utterly in thrall to their ‘wiring’ that they are compelled to act upon their impulses?

If so then it is very bleak on Planet BSoB, because those who commit crimes there cannot be asked to shoulder any personal blame or take any responsibility for them; ‘It was me wiring that made me do it guv.’

The notion is not one that I would accept, nor does the law or almost anyone else I know of or have read about.

This is hardly surprising because we, homo sapiens, are not slaves to our wiring, our instincts if you like, and if we were then no ordered society of any kind could possibly exist.

This is plainly not the case, and even if you postulate that society today is not worthy of the name then, for you to be correct, you would have to show that no ordered or civilised society had ever existed without resorting to your ‘Minority Report’ stuff.

This, I would submit, cannot be done without a severe risk of being considered, at very best, unbalanced.

Alan Thomas “concluding that he is possibly a tad troubled in his political outlook.”

Here we go again, reverting to form. Alan Thomas’s brief attempt at proper debate just below (‘prove it’) did not last long, and he is back to his usual office-gossipy style of ‘debating’ which consists of inserting indirect sneaky ad hominems into his posts – we all know what ‘troubled’ implies. Direct ad hominems are not allowed in these types of blogs, but it is not hard to insert them in an indirect way. It is not clever, or proper debating, although the use of personal comments is, perhaps, quite common in some office environments. And Alan Thomas is certainly from an office environment. He told us his ‘finest hour’, as he put it, was spending a huge company budget on retail expansion. That tells us a lot about him. Perhaps working all those years in management in offices has made him like he is now. I prefer to debate the actual points, so I apologise to normal posters for going off-topic, but sometimes when there are snakes slithering around and hissing time inevitably will get wasted.

Charles Sptehenson, just as I predicted he would do – and it was satisfying to see him fulfil my prediction so accurately - responded initially by implying that I am unbalanced and a conspiracy theorist. But now he changes his tactics slightly, and decides to use some proper argument, although he still likes to repeat his main catchphrase: ‘your having a laugh’.

Charles Stephenson writes: “To deal with the last part first; dogs are not ‘wired’ to be one way or the other as such. They are bred, through a process of unnatural selection, for certain characteristics.”

A pitbull has neuron networks that suggest to the dog that when it meets another dog, a fight is quite a good idea. This is represented by actual electrical impulses in actual neurons, so in that sense it is wiring. A labrador, on the other hand, tends to have neurons that suggest fighting to the death is *not* a good idea. The difference between the behaviour in the two animals can only be explained by differences in their neuron connections – ‘wiring’, and this can only explained by their genes, which are different in the two breeds due to selective breeding. Both breeds access the same gene pool, but the different breeds have taken a different selection of the genes available, thus taking the gene pool to its extremes – like one person having a hand of cards with just the clubs and another with just the hearts – same pack, different selection. With the dog breeds, same gene pool, different selection. With humans, same gene pool, different selection.

Many criminals are human equivalent of pitbulls, as their selection from the gene pool is at one end of the spectrum. A civilised society (which ours is not) would react to this by separating off those wired to be criminals from the rest of the population, and preventing them from either breeding or committing crimes against the rest of the population. On the other hand, a society in which criminal-empathisers dominate (ours), will pay the criminal underclass to breed, and will seek to release the violent underclass as early as possible from prison.

The Left do not like this concept that we are wired differently (see how posters on the left react to my comments and start their abuse), just as they do not like the idea that men and women are wired to behave differently. But nature defies the Left and continues to make more men skip lorry drivers than women, in spite of the Left telling nature it is not allowed to be sexist (apart from homosexuality, which, in this case, the Left says, is all in the genes and so images of homosexuality to infants in primary school cannot make any difference to their orientation later on).

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